Ipendo has always been competitive in its renewals service offering, even though a large part of the service supply chain has previously been outsourced to third party suppliers, with Ipendo being dependent on successful integration with those suppliers. Now, following the acquisition of Ipendo in September by CPA Global, the world’s leading provider of IP renewals services, we are able to provide an even higher quality of renewals service that is more closely integrated.
Patent and design renewals
Over 90% of Ipendo customers use our patent and design renewals service – and we are always seeking ways to be more responsive and make this interaction a richer experience for our customers. As part of CPA Global, we will be in an even better position to do this.
Richer experience
According to our customer feedback, one of the things you want is to have more detailed information on the status of each payment during the renewal process in order to give you more time for assessment. As part of the same company as our renewals service partner, we now have full control over our roadmap for process development, which allows us to make such information available to customers. The challenge is to keep things simple and bring in only information that is valuable – the “invoicing” status and “agent instruction” status, for example, gives an important overview for customers.
Improved responsiveness by combining service and software
The “one company effect” is also bringing the advantages of closer, automatated system integration to give customers a quicker and more responsive renewals and software service. Our key focus is to simplify administrative matters and provide customers with the best information and guidance for decision-making, thus saving considerable time and effort on their part. One criticism often leveled at renewal payment providers is the flood of queries between provider and customer and vice versa. We aim to make CPA Global’s best-in-class data verification service accessible to customers, providing cyclical updates of customer data, which will provide greater clarity on both sides and reduce the need for queries. Of course, in order to achieve this, we need an efficient approval process. The integration of data verification into the Ipendo Platform™ is still at development stage, but we are confident it will change the game as it will help reduce the time spent by busy IP departments in administering their IP Rights, while still giving them full control over these important assets. Finally, we are investigating bridging the gap between working with due dates calculated in the software and those that are manually verified. The calculated dates provide instant feedback, but are highly dependent on the accuracy of the data that is put into the system to begin with. On the other hand, the manually verified due dates are more secure, but this process is very time consuming and it can be a number of weeks before due dates are confirmed. With tighter integration, we can close the gap and also potentially combine the two techniques to allow instant feedback and then instant update based on manual data verification. Stay tuned.
Trademark renewals
Trademark renewals are slightly different to patent and design renewals in that there is more collaboration between owner, service provider and the IP authorities during the renewal process in countries where there are formalities requirements. Integrated experience For the moment, the trademark renewals service will be undertaken utilizing the current email-based processes. But a transition to an integrated experience is underway, where we will seek to communicate all requirements for the renewal process through the Ipendo Platform™.
Ipendo event functionality = Best-in-class collaboration
We are also investigating how Ipendo’s event functionality where costs, documents and actions can be bundled can be utilized for more effective trademark renewals. With our improved in-house capacity, we aim to deliver the most comprehensive trademark renewal service available.
Extranet developments
Ipendo has grown our renewals business in the corporate segment based on the secure “Automatic Pay” solution. With the launch of renewals on our extranet - where law firms can interact directly with their customers - we are developing a “Pay on Instruction” facility, providing a truly flexible service for customers. Furthermore, benefiting from our experiences with “Automatic Pay”, we will be able to make “Pay on Instruction” more secure with the functionality to avoid flooding mailboxes or sending too much paper, thereby also helping your organization with your environmental goals.
Knowing the value of your portfolio
In conjunction with CPA Global, we can also help you better understand the value and competitive strength of your IP portfolio through our unique Insight patent analytics service. On your instruction, we can perform a competitive analysis of your IP Rights, providing a comprehensive report assessing the strengths and weaknesses of your patent portfolio against those of your competitors. As we already hold your data we are able to respond quickly to requests for such insightful analysis.
By Marc Karlsson